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Google Talks Energy Efficiency, Cloud Computing

Google moved to publicly refute claims that its data centers and products are somehow energy inefficient, posting data on its blog that compares the energy used in a Google search against other everyday electricity-burning activities. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has placed his company at the forefront of the country's energy debate, arguing that green IT can contribute to lowering the nation's overall carbon footprint.

Google is again trying to show how much it loves a reduced carbon footprint.

Google moved quickly to refute those findings, arguing that the speed of its search processes prevented it from burning so much energy. Now, the company seems determined to drill down into the issue a little further.

"Our engineers crunched the numbers and found that an average query uses about 1 kJ of energy and emits about 0.2 grams of carbon dioxide," Urs Holzle, senior vice president of Operations at Google, wrote in the May 11 posting. In context, he claims, it would take 3.1 million Google searches to equal the electricity consumed by the average U.S. household in one month.

Further reading

At the same time, Google claims that it has dedicated engineers to milking as much carbon efficiency as possible out of its data centers. "Through efficiency innovations, we have managed to cut energy usage in our data centers by over 50 percent, so we're using less than half the energy to run our data centers as the industry average," Holzle wrote. "This efficiency means that in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will likely use more energy than we will use to answer your query."

Google has been pushing a national energy plan, with CEO Eric Schmidt proposing a sweeping national energy plan that will slice greenhouse gas emissions nearly in half by 2030. In addition to acting out of pure altruism, Schmidt claims that such a plan would save his company enormous amounts of money in the long-term.

Also in March 2009, Google announced that it was setting up Google Ventures, a venture capital fund intended to invest in consumer Internet, software, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care, and other startup areas. Some of its projects run through that arm could conceivably involve "green" IT.

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